Hopper's painting belongs to no school, copies no recognizable model, and depends on no programme, it is one of the most unmistakable individual styles in American art, recognized at a glance, and built across a long working life from a small set of obsessions.
Hopper grew up in a Hudson River town in a household that supported his early interest in art. His decision to enter the New York School of Art placed him under two of the most influential American teachers of the period, Chase, the leading American Impressionist of his generation, and Henri, who was reorienting American painting toward the gritty everyday subjects that would define the Ashcan School, and his years there gave him both a cosmopolitan technical foundation and an immediate model for an art committed to the visible American world.
The trips to Europe are crucial to understanding his subsequent independence. He went to Paris and to other European capitals at exactly the moment Cubism was being invented, and he chose, in effect, to walk past it. He admired Manet, Degas, and the older European tradition of urban observation, but the Fauvist and Cubist work of his contemporaries left him cold, and he came home with a sense that his subject was American and his manner would be his own.
The first decade and a half of his independent career was hard. His paintings sold poorly, and he supported himself by producing magazine and advertising illustrations and a long sequence of etchings, work he later distanced himself from but which gave him a sustained training in light, shadow, and the figure-in-architecture compositions that would become his mature subject. The marriage to Josephine Nivison was the turning point. She advocated for his watercolors with the Brooklyn Museum, secured his first major exhibition, and from that point on managed his sittings, record-keeping, and correspondence; she was also his almost exclusive female model for the rest of his life.
The mature paintings established the vocabulary by which he is now most readily identified: a single building or interior, raked by hard sun or caught at the moment of dawn or twilight, populated, when populated at all, by one or two solitary figures who do not look at one another. The recurring images, the late-night diner, the mansard-roofed Victorian house, the empty row of shopfronts at first light, the unattended gas station, are all versions of the same essential project: a quiet, exact picture of the American built environment under particular qualities of light, with the human figure permitted to enter only on the strict condition that it not break the silence.
His position in twentieth-century American art has only grown in the decades since his death. He has been credited as a precursor by painters as different as Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, and Mark Rothko, and his work has been continuously absorbed by film, photography, and popular culture in ways few other twentieth-century painters can match. The Whitney Museum, which holds the great body of his work and archive, has periodically anchored its understanding of American modernism around him, and his name today is among the small handful of twentieth-century American artists whose work is recognized, and whose images are quoted, well beyond the audiences of the museums and galleries themselves.